Yes.
We were speaking of music. I wanted to play the piano and my mother bought lessons for me when I was a little girl younger than Alice here. I walked once a week across the field and paid a quarter per lesson. I walked half a mile across a plowed field to the teacher. I could do the right hand but couldn’t seem to make the left hand play in time, and after a month or two the teacher said to Mother, She doesn’t seem to be making much progress. Doesn’t she practice? Mother said, I don’t believe she does. Then Mother told me, Willa, you either have to practice or give up your lessons. I went out to the barn and just cried. A quarter was a lot of money then, like a dollar is now. Oh, more than a dollar, much more. So I told Mama I’d stop, I wouldn’t waste any more money. I’ve criticized and rebuked myself a hundred times since. I do so like music. I used to dance too.
I never heard you talk about the dancing, Mother.
Yes. I did tap dance with shiny shoes.
Then no one said any more. After a while Alice heard Willa begin to snore and then the softer snoring of Alene and the breathing of Lorraine right beside her. She opened her eyes once more under the cloth, the warm daylight was there, and she shut her eyes.
When she woke she was surprised that she had been asleep. The women were sitting up, not talking, only looking out toward the barn, waiting for her to wake. It was very hot now in the afternoon, with only a little hot wind blowing.
We ought to go swimming, Lorraine said. I wish there was a creek out here.
I used to dunk my head in the stock tank on a hot day, Alene said.
The cattle are there now, Willa said.
They wouldn’t bother us.
It’s so dirty out there.
It’s not that bad.
We don’t have any bathing suits.
Oh damn the bathing suits, Mother.
They looked at each other and laughed.
All right then. But we do need towels.
I’ll get them.
And we can take out the lawn chairs, Willa said. I’m not sitting in the dirt. I don’t care what you say.
The three women and the girl walked out to the barn carrying the towels and the lawn chairs and the leftover wine and went in through the gate and crossed the hot empty corral, going out into the pasture through the far gate, and walked along the path worn by the cattle alongside the fence and stopped at the stock tank. There was a pad of concrete laid around it, with dirt and manure below it and mud on the low side of the tank where the tank overflowed, the mud pocked with the deep split hoofprints of cattle. The tank was brimming full. Behind it, the windmill ran water whenever the wind gusted up, the pump banged and clanked, the rod jerked up and down, then the cold fresh clean water spouted out through a long pipe.
They set the lawn chairs in a line back from the tank. Alice stepped up on the concrete apron and looked in and felt the cold water. On the bottom was a bed of mud and there were strings of green moss around the edges. She could see black tadpoles squirming away into the mud. She went back to the women.